Past the busy ring road and the northern reaches of Paris, the house sits just a few hundred metres from what people here call the “vertical slums.” Apartment towers that appear condemned, the canvases for generations of graffiti. At the top of one building, a vulgar suggestion is aimed at a police chief from two decades ago.

Inside, broken apartments. Elevators that don’t work. People who don’t, either. There are so few jobs that the so-called “ministry” started paying youth to bring groceries up the dank stairwells.

Tuberculosis is on the comeback.

Inside the ministry, run by a group of activists hoping to change Clichy, a dozen young people from this troubled suburb of 30,000 north of Paris are gathered. Some have African heritage, some Middle Eastern, but their voices are stunningly similar.

“We are in France, but we are pushed to the side,” says Sehli Merle, 20. “There’s Clichy and then there is France. We are rejected.”

“In France there are the French, and then there’s us,” adds 21-year-old Bourama Marna, whose family is from Senegal.

“Before,” says Reagan Muquembo, 22, “they needed immigrants to help rebuild the country. But now we’re not needed anymore.”

“That’s because you have blue eyes!” Muquembo retorts. Belhadj shrugs.

What unites them, beyond the fact that they are all of immigrant extraction, is their feeling of social isolation in a country having serious trouble integrating its foreigners.

France is far from alone. Countries across Europe are struggling with integration.

This is in large part, experts say, because they’re relatively new and inexperienced at the immigration game.

“Unlike Canada or the U.S. or Australia, which are countries that have been formed by centuries of immigration, these countries have known it relatively recently,” said Leslie Seidle, research director at the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy.

After World War II, many countries brought in guest workers from North Africa and Turkey, for instance, and later found they didn’t return home. Instead, they brought their families.

And as the economic crisis continues to squeeze Europe, foreigners are taking the brunt of the worry and anger.

Across the continent from the Netherlands to Greece, citizens are electing anti-immigrant or anti-Islam politicians to positions of power. Intolerance is rapidly rising.

Immigrants, it declared in a report issued last year, “are not expected to renounce their faith, culture or identity. Neither Islam nor any other religion should be considered a priori incompatible with European values.”

The Council then posed a question that seems banal for North Americans but is dramatic in Europe. “‘Hyphenated’ Americans — proud and patriotic U.S. citizens, who nonetheless treasure and affirm their connection with the country or region from which they or their families came — are considered quite normal,” they persisted.

“Why not ‘hyphenated Europeans?’”

In France, the struggle, as many see it, is to be considered French at all, let alone hyphenated.

In Europe, “France is the most anti-multicultural at the level of public policy and philosophical statements,” said Queen’s University political studies professor Keith Banting.

France never adopted policies to recognize or accommodate cultural differences. And its insistence on secularism makes religious difference less tolerated — hence bans on head scarves in schools, for instance.

Policy models that measure the level of “multiculturalism” or integration efforts, from language training to citizenship accessibility to media depictions, tend to place France near the bottom.

Canada, by contrast, gets 7.5. Sweden is at 7, and the Netherlands, 2.

Feeding France’s scores are controversial laws like the one banning the niqab in public, which came into effect in April 2011. And most visibly, the repeated riots in the dilapidated suburbs of Paris and Lyon, riots that stem from youth’s continuing feelings of being excluded from any chance at success.

“Swedes,” it adds, “are known for being open and curious toward other cultures.”

Some would beg to differ. In Malmö’s Herrgarden district, whose reputation among Swedes approaches that of Clichy-sous-bois in France, you would be hard-pressed to find a single person who has a Swedish friend or acquaintance.

Segregation is also intensifying in Amsterdam, officials say, but there you don’t see the segregated ethnic enclaves like you do in France or Sweden.

The idea of multiculturalism in the Netherlands has completely fallen out of favour.

For several years, the nation with a reputation for progressive values and liberalism has led Europe in tightening access to citizenship and introducing “coercive” measures to force integration into Dutch society. That has led to a precipitous drop in naturalizations, from 70,000 in 1995 to 18,000 in 2010, according to Statistics Netherlands.

However, two major, separate studies indicate that Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands tend to identify more with that country than do their counterparts in France or Sweden.

One of those studies, Eurislam, offers the tentative conclusion that “socio-cultural integration is independent” of national politics and integration policies, said Jean Tillie, a professor at the University of Amsterdam leading the study. Integration, he suggested, depends more on education, employment, and perhaps gender (girls do better than boys).

Still, immigrants in general, and Muslims especially, feel the pressure all over Europe these days. No country has found the right recipe for integration.

So Banting isn’t surprised that, at least on the ground in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, people’s lives might not be so different.

“Europe is in despair,” he summarized. “They’ve got big problems in countries that didn’t adopt multicultural policies, as well as countries that did.

Unlike in Canada — with its heavy emphasis on selecting highly skilled immigrants or those with financial means — 80 per cent of legal migrants to Europe arrive as refugees or through family reunification, according Christian Joppke, an expert in integration at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The level of education and training affects the ease with which immigrants can move into the labour market.

“The single biggest driver of educational attainment of any population of young people is the education level of the parents,” Banting added. That means policies to force integration are simply “not enough to offset the high levels of poorly educated immigrant populations and poor educational outcomes for the second generation.”

Politicians in France and the Netherlands have openly talked of increasing the level of “selected” immigrants.

Several Swedish experts, meanwhile, have published a book called Kanadamodellen, looking to Canada as a model. The government has already made it easier for highly skilled immigrants to come to Sweden.

“Sweden compares itself to, and lots of the policy comes from, Canada,” said Pieter Bevelander, professor of international migration and ethnic relations at Malmö University. “The latest, to open things up for labour migrants, is due to the government looking at Canada.”

Skill-based immigrant selection lessens the need for more repressive integration policies, Joppke argues in a new position paper.

Joppke urged European countries to begin to “select the ‘right’ immigrants.”

He wrote of Canada’s “happy equilibrium” of multicultural integration “that is as ‘muscular’ as it is accommodating.”

However, in an interview, Joppke said Europe would still have a problem even if it adopts such policies. Most skilled immigrants, given the choice, prefer to come to Canada or the U.S.

“Not only do they find nicely paid jobs, but there’s the whole package: citizenship, a more optimistic and forward-looking place, they look at how their families will do also. It’s very difficult to change that.

By contrast, he describes European countries as “settled, ethnic societies” where immigration is seen as a peripheral phenomenon and not widely liked.

“Europe has not learned how to make newcomers equally valued members of society,” Joppke continued. “I don’t know that they will.”